Abstract: Literary geography takes a geographical approach to the study of literature and considers the spatial relationships between people, texts, and places. In a recent article for the interdisciplinary journal Literary Geographies, Sheila Hones initiates ‘interspatiality’ to articulate more precisely the ‘multidirectional textual-social-spatial interconnectivity’ between geographies internal, between, and external to literary narratives (2022: 16). As a traditional form of storytelling, folklore generates geographically specific narratives which intersect with and inform our understanding of place. Using interspatiality as a framework for the literary geographical analysis of folklore, this talk takes Yanagita Kunio’s 1910 work Tōno monogatari, a textual record of 119 traditional folktales from the northeast of Japan, to illustrate how the blending of imagined and actual-world spaces takes place through the production and circulation of folk narratives.

Bio: James Thurgill is a Specially-appointed Associate Professor at The University of Tokyo, Japan, where he teaches cultural and literary geography. His research examines spatial experiences and geographic imaginings of absence, haunting, and folklore. James is Principal Investigator of the four-year JSPS-funded project ‘Literary Geographies of Folklore’ (2020-2024), co-author of A Todai Philosophical Walk (2021), and co-editor of University of Wales Press’ newly established Literary Geography: Theory and Practice book series. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.